1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an optimized video stitching method, more especially to an optimized video stitching method for high resolution/high frame rate video.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A conventional stitching method, as described in the United States Patent US 20030235344A1, is shown in FIG. 1. As shown in FIG. 1, firstly, all the input images are transformed to a planar surface. Secondly, the stitching points are calculated with the image registration algorithm. Thirdly, the overlap regions of the images are merged to smooth out the differences near the stitching points and then stitched into one seamless wide-angle image. Finally, the seamless wide-angle image is transformed to a cylindrical surface. As far as the implementation in the hardware engine is concerned, the whole frame of video data needs to be stored in the DRAM on a separate chip from the stitching engine. In the conventional stitching method, both of the video frame data on the planar and cylindrical surfaces need to be stored and the image registration needs to access the planar frame data recursively to find the matched blocks in the image overlap regions. Therefore, the bandwidth requirement of external memory access for video stitching is very large and is not feasible with the above-mentioned method at a reasonable fps (frame per second). Apart from this, the computation requirement for image registration puts limitation to achieve reasonable frame rate.